Warning that “extractive industries” cannot be allowed to leave behind “destroyed ecosystem[s]” and displaced communities in their pursuit of wealth, Supreme Court judge Justice B V Nagarathna on Saturday strongly advocated for a judicial and governmental framework rooted in “environmental justice”.
Delivering the Justice S B Sinha 4th Endowment Memorial Lecture at the National University of Study and Research in Law in Ranchi, Justice Nagarathna emphasised that environmental protection must be pursued alongside social equity. She said that pollution, climate change, and resource depletion do not affect all persons equally, but “disproportionately affect the poor and marginalised”.
“Environmental questions are never merely about air, water, or forests in isolation,” she said. “They are also about people.” She defined environmental justice as a “normative framework that integrates ecological protection with equality, distributive fairness, and democratic participation”, extending the constitutional right to life “beyond mere survival to encompass health, dignity, and well-being”.
In her address, she focused on the moral and legal responsibilities of corporations, particularly extractive industries like mining and oil, which she said “frequently operate in ecologically fragile and socially vulnerable regions such as … Jharkhand”.
“Profit should not be allowed to pretend it stands alone,” Justice Nagarathna remarked. She observed that while corporations “arrive with permits and licences”, they often “leave behind altered landscapes”.
She added, “The damage may not necessarily be immediate, nor always be visible from afar but it shows up slowly: in water that can no longer be drunk; in soil that refuses to grow crops; in communities that has lost not just land but memory.”
Stressing that no financial remedy can fully rehabilitate a “destroyed ecosystem” or a “displaced cultural identity”, she highlighted that the mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) regime under the Companies Act is not mere voluntarism but an enforceable obligation reflecting that economic success is “neither socially neutral nor environmentally detached.”
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She also cautioned against the “othering” of nature, a tendency evident, according to her, in the frequent use of the term “natural disasters”. She pointed out that disasters largely arise because human settlements are “designed without sufficient regard for ecological interactions”. Citing the example of frequent flooding in Bengaluru, she noted that the degradation of lakes that once acted as buffers has led to urban floods. “Despite the clear role of human actions, such events are labelled ‘natural disasters,’ shifting blame onto nature,” she observed.
Addressing how the judiciary and the government should navigate these complex challenges, Justice Nagarathna described environmental law as “hot law”—a term coined by environmental law scholar Elizabeth Fisher to describe a field that is dynamic, forward-looking, and shaped at the intersection of evolving science, economics, and politics. Because scientific knowledge is “provisional and evolving”, she explained, legal standards cannot rely on static rules but must remain responsive to new information.
To navigate this uncertainty, she outlined three factors that must guide judicial and governmental leadership. First, decisions must be highly sensitive to context, adapting the law to prevent injustice, much like how, she said, the Supreme Court evolved the doctrine of “absolute liability”—holding hazardous industries strictly accountable—in the aftermath of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy.
Second, decision-makers must engage in a careful balancing of competing developmental and ecological interests.
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Third, she underlined, is the necessity of outright prohibition. Justice Nagarathna stated that balancing has its limits, and certain biologically significant areas, bio-corridors, and eco-sensitive zones must be declared inviolable. Recognising that some ecological thresholds, once crossed, cannot be remedied, she urged governments to refrain from approving activities like unchecked tourism and wildlife safaris in forest sanctuaries.
Quoting English philosopher Edmund Burke, she reminded the audience that society is a partnership of the living, the dead, and the unborn, adding that courts must never forget that they act as “custodians for the unborn and the future generations”.
This approach builds upon decades of Indian environmental jurisprudence, she pointed out, which began constitutionalising environmental protection in 1976 through the introduction of Articles 48A and 51A(g) into the Constitution, mandating the State and citizens to protect nature.
Over the years, the Supreme Court has expanded this into a fundamental right to a healthy environment, shifting from an “anthropocentric” or human-centred approach to an “ecocentric” one that recognises the intrinsic value of nature, she said, guided by principles like the “polluter pays” rule and “intergenerational equity”.
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The lecture was organised in memory of the late Justice S B Sinha, a jurist born in present-day Jharkhand, who was a judge in four different high courts before serving on the Supreme Court bench from 2002 to 2009. Remembering him as one of the top “dissenter-judges” in the court’s history, Justice Nagarathna said his legacy was that of principled reasoning and a firm commitment to constitutional values.
